Category Archives: Philosophy

Intentional extension

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

Reading Schutz’s observations of the “intentional gaze” I am realizing how important the concept of intentional mediation as a means to extend our intentionality (both active and receptive intention) is to my own thinking. This is the sentence that sparked it:

However, as I am always interpreting these perceptions as “body of another,” I am always interpreting them as something having an implicit reference to “consciousness of another.” Thus the bodily movements are perceived not only as physical events but also as a sign that the other person is having certain lived experiences which he is expressing through those movements. My intentional gaze is directed right through my perceptions of his bodily movements to his lived experiences lying behind them and signified by them signitive relation is essential to this mode of apprehending another’s lived experiences.

This concept of intentional gaze passing directly through a mediating phenomenon to an underlying reality (in a transparent and spontaneous act of interpretation) brings to mind a couple of seminal phenomenological example. The first is Merleau-Ponty’s blind man perceiving his path through his cane. The perception of the path passes transparently through the cane. The second is Heidegger’s concept of “ready-to-hand” where the intention passes from the body through the tool, and the tool becomes a transparent extension of the will.

Of course, as any praxis-aware designer knows, in tool use we are not simply acting on a passive object but interacting with some matter through the tool, in a complex feedback rhythm of acting and perceiving: crafting. (Crafting is the material form of instauration, the act of making-discovering. Crafting is discovering the possibilities of a material while also shaping the material in response to what is sensed as possible.) Most of our crafting is mediated through tools, through which we act upon an object and also through which we sometimes perceive the object and its possibilities.

So, between Heidegger’s will-extending hammer and Merleau-Ponty’s perception-extending blind man’s cane is a range of intention-extending instruments that mediate both action and perception.

And among these instruments is the most important instrument of all, concepts. Through concepts we perceive and respond to phenomena and, by extension, reality. (Thinking about concepts as transparent, mediating, intention-extending tools for forming perceptions, conceptions and consequent judgments, beliefs and actions — tools we can and should try out, compare and evaluate before adopting them is the subject of my next book, tentatively titled Second Natural.)

Obviously, seeing craft this way — and more generally, instauration — blurs the traditional boundaries between self and non-self, even beyond the blur generated by extended cognition, which is why I’ve called this “extended being”. But maybe calling it extended existence would be better.

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A couple of years ago, when I was reading postphenomenology, recalling the deep connections between phenomenology and existentialism, I wondered what the existential analogue of postphenomenology would look like. What could postexistentialism look like? If I weren’t all posted out, I might be tempted to call my design instrumentalism — this idea that we ought to treat our transparently intention-mediating concepts as designed artifacts that we can compare with alternatives, adopt, or modify or reject — as post existentialism. What could be a more radical form of self-determination and responsibility than to instaurate our concepts with intention?

The concept of concept

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Fructivism, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Trefoil

The word “concept” is ambiguous. In casual use we tend to treat a concept as the object of conception: an idea we can present to others. But we will also use it in ways that suggest a capacity to conceive. For instance, in math, a teacher will present a concept to a student in multiple ways until the student gets it, and everything snaps in place and becomes clear. What exactly does it mean that the student understands the concept?

The ambiguity can be resolved if we evert our understanding of concept — flip it inside out, reversing all subject-object, interior-exterior relationships. Instead of understanding concept primarily as an object of conception, concept is understood as the subject of conception.

(In other words, a concept is not conceived. A concept conceives. A concept may conceive an idea, or a judgment, or a relationship, or an argument, or a response. Even when we are understanding, we are conceiving — re-conceiving — an existing conception. When the eureka moment hits, what did not make sense suddenly does makes sense. When you repeat words that a moment ago were recited tentatively, you now state them confidently and fluently. The sentence that was a series of disconnected, isolated words is now infused with the coherence and lucidity of a concept — not only said, but meant.)

Even in the case of an object we call a “concept”, the real purpose of that object is to induce a subjective concept capable of “getting” the meaning of the object. It serves as an objective mold against which a subjective being can take shape.

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A concept is that which makes the experiential flux significant in some distinct way.

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Concepts resist conception, in the same way that we cannot see sight or hold onto holding. Concepts are that by which a subject conceives an object, and experiences it as something with significance. Concepts produce objectivity, but are not themselves objects.

This is why concepts can only be defined pragmatically. A concept can only be understood in terms of what it does. Trying to understand a concept by what it is — defining it objectively — renders the very concept of concept unintelligible.

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Pragmatic definition itself provides a fine example of how concepts work.

To understand a meaning pragmatically requires use of a concept.

I can provide C. S. Peirce’s formulation of the pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”

Without the concept by which this maxim becomes comprehensible, the maxim remains meaningless. But once the concept that renders the pragmatic maxim comprehensible is acquired, the concept is available for use in conceiving and understanding pragmatically, without any explicit reference to the maxim which engendered the concept. The more it is used, the more concept is simply a second-natural, undetected act of understanding, indistinguishable from the conception, or from the truth the conception knows, or from reality.

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Acquisition of concepts changes one’s experience of reality, bringing possibilities into conception that were literally inconceivable a moment before. New concepts often effect re-conceptions of existing understandings, spontaneously changing their significance. They can also cause us to perceive new features of reality which were imperceptible or chaotic and vague.

We have many words for these new concept events. Some are inspirational, where new concepts reinforce and strengthen concepts we are already using. They may be epiphanic and reorder much of what we think we know, bringing things into clarity which had been opaque, murky or troubling. Some concepts strike depths of change that are literally inconceivable until the concept irrupts ex nihilo and transfigures literally everything. This is when we talk about conversion.

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By understanding the role concepts play in our relationship with reality, it becomes possible to discuss religious experience without recourse to magical or superstition, which many thinkers, including myself, find intellectually unacceptable, or to psychology, which many religious people, including myself, find reductive, demoralizing and patronizing.

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Can concepts be intentionally changed? Yes.

Does that mean we can start with an intended outcome, such as believing something we want to believe, or feeling some specific way about life that we want to feel, and develop concepts to make us think or feel this desired way? Mostly, no.

We can, however, observe the outcomes of our concepts, and work to discover or create, or discover-create (instaurate) concepts with better outcomes.

And we can even do so with constraints or requirements in mind. Whatever we develop, we might want it to help us feel the value of life more. We might want it to guide our actions more effectively. We might want it to help us explain what cries out for explanation, or to argue for what needs to be argued.

Understanding concepts liberates us from the obligation to passively accept what is presented as truth, simply because it is true. We can also ask: True, how? And we can also ask: True, how else?

Understanding concepts empowers us for pluralist existence.

Report from holography camp

Biography, Philosophy, Star

When I was a little nerd adolescent, I went to holography camp in a remote rural university village. Unfortunately, this village was full of attractive professor’s daughters who were so isolated from the rest of civilization they seemed unaware and unconcerned that we were nerds attending a holography camp. Consequently I learned more about the technical functioning of bra hooks than of lasers and holographic film.

But I did learn one fact about holograms that stuck with me, which is useful for designing metaphors. Every tiny cell on a plane of holographic film contains in its tiny cup-like parabolic interior an image of a whole environment as viewed from its own point on the film. Somehow when one beam of laser light is split into two beams, with one half of the beam illuminating an object and another projected directly on a sheet of holographic film,  the exposed film is imprinted with an interference pattern inside each of those cells. After the film is developed, each cell projects that interference pattern in a way that allows two different images to be seen by each of our eyes, creating a parallax effect — a perception of depth. That is everything I know about holography, plus several things I actually don’t really understand.  Maybe I should try building a metaphor on bra hooks, instead.

The concept: Every point in space, time and consciousness contains an overlapping image of the whole.

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Standing here, surveying the surrounding space, I understand the space as a field of virtual here-standpoints, each with its own surrounding space, which overlaps all other surrounding spaces. Pragmatically, “here” means all this, folded in implication, ready to unfold in action or explication.

And right now, reading Alfred Schutz, I understand time the same way. Every now is composed of complex tenses looking forward into the future and backward into the past at other virtual nows, each with its own past and future, which also be considered through nested verb tense modes. When we plan, at a virtual future now’s past in the mode of future perfect tense.

Repeat with the I, where every other self is understood as a virtual I, within which the actual and virtual time and space manifold repeats and overlaps.

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When I understand space, time and self in this enholistic — to distinguishing this subjective transcendental holism from the objective holism of systems thinkers, gestalt psychologists — I simply am religious.

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By the way, working on unhooking that bra strap has religious significance.

The sudden, intense, all-consuming awareness of the existence of a girl, as someone who looks back and perceives, thinks, feels and judges, is for many boys the first experience of transcendence. Because many people never experience any epiphanies of comparable intensity in any other sphere, romantic love has been  worshipped in popular culture.

More scholastoidal musings

Philosophy

Whatness is comprehended.

Thatness is apprehended.

  • Whoness apprehends.
  • Weness comprehends.

(The last two were experimental points. I am suggesting, if it isn’t obvious, that comprehending is an essentially social act, even if we do it solitarily. Comprehending is an act of lifeworld participation, the inhabiting of a shared intellectual environment, or what I’ve called “enworldment”. Any being we encounter that we apprehend as capable of apprehending, we experience as a “who” not a “what”, but we can only experience that being as a participant in we to the degree comprehension can be shared.)

Body : habitat :: organism : planet :: being : world

Scholastoidal definitions

Philosophy

Ok, this is going to be ridiculous, but I have some fundamental sorting to do. I need to clarify the relationships between thatness, whatness, whichness and whoness. Laugh away; I’m doing this.

The need for clarity began when I stumbled over this line in Schutz: “…in self-knowledge there is a sphere of absolute intimacy whose ‘being there’ (Dasein) is just as indubitable as it is closed to our inspection. The experiences peculiar to this sphere are simply inaccessible to memory, and this fact pertains to their mode of being: memory catches only the ‘that’ of these experiences.”

This is an important matter for me, because it touches on my recently-revived skepticism about how we conceive the unconscious, which ties into the ways language mediates our experiences, including that design-destroying assumption language does (and ought to) micromanage our actions. Extremely usable design makes objects second-natural extensions of our own selves. And my next book will argue that our very concepts ought to have this same quality in use: if you have to think about a concept when applying it, that’s a poorly-designed concept. A well-designed concept operates so invisibly that the thought thinks itself through the working of the concept. But I am digressing now, so I’ll get back to my sorting…

I believe thatness is raw apprehension, the registering of a particular entity as existent.

When we identify a particular existence as something, that identity is its whatness (or “quiddity”).

But even in identifying a that as some general what, the fact of its particular uniqueness remains as its thisness (or “haecceity”).

But all these -nesses are done by minds, and done in some particular way (as opposed to all other possible ways), and this capacity is whoness.

Who a person is, their very subjectivity, is their habits of attending (and neglecting) particular forms of thatness and their ways comprehending thatness as having some kind of general whatness and particular thisness.

When someone views themselves primarily as the comprehending what instead of the apprehending, comprehending who, that person becomes self-alienated in a state Sartre called “bad faith”. This is one primary reason I oppose identitarianism. Identitarianism produces a subjective vacuum where a self should be, and that vacuum suffers in a way it does not know how to conceptualize. Having no access to subjective understanding it seeks to explain its suffering objectively. The self is a suffering object made to suffer by other objects. No amount of objective action can relieve the agony of being trapped in this subjectivity-blindness, because the last place such people look for relief is in their own conceptions. To reach this way of thinking to others is to spread a fatal philosophical disease.

Yeah. I’ll never be a real Scholastic, but I’ll certainly raid it for parts.

Reconceiving the unconscious

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy, Politics

Reading Schutz, and examining the structure of lived experience I am suspecting more and more that what we call “unconscious” and habitually conceptualize spatially as submerged beneath our awareness has been misconceived — or, to put it in more designerly language, is a conceptualization that introduces tradeoffs which might not be optimal for our purposes. And what is this purpose, I’d like to optimize for? I’ll try to pin it down: I think in popular thought (which is the thought that creates, re-creates and shapes society, through ethnomethods) we radically misunderstand the relationship between language and lived experience. We have a tendency to conflate consciousness and speech. If something resists language, and we find ourselves unable to capture it our memory with the help of words, that wordless memory of images, sounds, feelings, etc. seems to sink faster into oblivion, and to be harder to retrieve. My hunch is that words are nonverbal memory aids that condense experience from the mental environment. When we have words for what happens to us we are able to “objectify” what is going on, whether what is going on is “out there” in the world or “in here” in my memory. With language we produce sharper objectifications that go into our memories and we have mnemonic objects that will condense the sensory recollections when we wish to recall the experience later.

So in my model, the unconscious is just those mental activities that we have not articulated for objective knowing. But these are not autonomous demon-like beings who slip in the shadows and depths, who move us against our will when we ease our vigilance, hiding our under-selves from what our minds will tolerate. I see this as a nasty vestige of medieval religiosity — one that keeps popping up among people who fancy themselves secular, but whose minds still move in superstitious ruts.

I prefer to understand what we call the unconscious as that vast set of tacit perceptual, kinetic, feeling realities hiding in plain sight, but inaccessible to linguistic thought. They are there, real, tangible, important but we don’t have words for them so they evaporate like dreams after we experience them unless something happens to us that causes the vapor to condense again. One of the great benefits of words is they are reliable memory condensers.

Folks who “think visually” or who take their intuitions and mind motions seriously as real and significant prior to any ability to articulate or conceptualize or demonstrate or argue them have a capacity to create thoughts outside the dominant language games of the culture. I want to articulate some of these realities and make them more thinkable. But also, I want to banish the latter-day demons of the Freudish “unconscious” that seems to have reemerge to haunt our social and political anxieties.

I also find our beliefs about the role of language in our everyday behavior to mislead designers. If we believe users verbalize instructions to themselves that their bodies obey when using software, we stop trying to directly engage our hands. If we understand that language itself is an interface that we use to help us make sense of experience when other means fail, we create two layers of interface between users and their tools. A great user interface minimizes the requirement to verbalize, so tools become invisible, ready-to-hand extensions of the user’s will.

Try these ideas on with this line of thought. The political crisis we are in now, with deep roots in the American tradition, can be seen as starting with the rise of social media. Much of our social lives, and our lives in general, became heavily word-mediated. Normally, when people gather it is around experiences. Things are enjoyed together — food drink, music, art, laughter — and experiences unfold over the course of hours. Social media is fast language. TL;DR, scan, scroll, start, stop, scroll. Not only are people’s blah-blah flipped through like TV channels, but engagement is sporadic and flitting. Written literature has time to evoke, conjure, hint, suggest and condense memories and knowings. Fast language only recalls or refers. It is spastic and explicit. Expastic language could be a good word for fast language, dittos and hashtags. But things got worse when Covid put everyone in social isolation. Then the entire world had to be strained through screens. The realm of shared tacit realities constricted and the word-world expanded explosively. I think what we are seeing now is the opposite of an eruption of the unconscious. I think the sensible wisdom our tacit understandings were removed from the public setting, and brainless verbal logic took over and is running itself to its logical extremes inside s frictionless, gravityless vacuum of collective solipsism.

Political dyslexia

Philosophy, Politics

The terms “far-right” and “far-left” are being used far too frequently, casually, and imprecisely — and maybe completely incorrectly.

American conservatism is right, but has rarely gotten anywhere near far-right since the disgrace of Jim Crow. And America’s own New Deal reforms were nowhere near far-left either. I’ve seen Libertarianism called far-right, but it is right-of center at most, and it is arguably the exact center-point.

Here is how I view the range.

  • Far-right seeks inequality under the law. It works to establish formally ranked classes of people, each with different rights, duties and privileges.
  • Center seeks equality under the law. It acknowledges only one class of person: citizen.
  • Far-left seeks equity under the law. It works to give every citizen the same level of wealth and power, taking from those with more and giving to those with less.

Today’s Progressivism is a tricky case. It presents itself as left, and promises equity. However the equity it promises is not equity among every citizen as leftism normally does. It promises equity to protected categories of people viewed in aggregate. All protected groups will have an equal share in the highest classes. But this movement does not does not see inequality among classes as intrinsically problematic. It almost seems to view class inequality as just as long as every group has its share of the inequality. This acceptance of class inequality is more typical of the right. If you look at Progressivism through a more typical leftist lens and see it as a dominant ideology whose function is to establish, justify and preserve the hegemony of the professional class, collective equity is a legitimation strategy, not a program of substantial reform. This would help explain why Progressivism dominates nearly all mainstream institutions, including most Fortune 500 corporations, public education, popular entertainment, the popular press and popular culture in general. If Progressivism sought individual equity, it would threaten these institutions and would meet resistance from them.

If this is, in fact, the case, our nation is suffering from severe dyslexia.

Things are truly scrambled.

Philosophy as performing art

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

I have been struggling hellishly with the very simple, basic question: “What is a philosophy?” This is terribly important, because if I want to persuade people that philosophies (or worldviews, lifeworlds, enworldments or faiths) are designable things, and that they ought to be designed — and that is exactly my intention — I’d better be able to explain what it is we are designing.

But I have been unable to do it, which is perplexing, upsetting and exciting. This combo has a pavlovian effect on me, and I can’t leave it alone.

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Yesterday I had my weekly conversation with Nick Gall, and we had a fun argument over the significance of Golden Rule. The conversation started off rockily. It was clear that he and I were thinking about it very differently (“at cross-purposes”), in a way that went deeper than definitions or even values, into the how of the thinking. We eventually realized that he was thinking about the formula “Treat others as you would like to be treated” pragmatically but statically (maybe as a trained lawyer), as a proposition with bounded implications. I was thinking of it dynamically as a lived principle, with so that the proposition’s meaning deepens and self-transcends over time with successive recursions.

It was really tricky getting aligned on what we we talking about, and how we could approach the conversation in order to break the impasse. Three thing happened that made it work.

  1. We recognized that we were disagreeing not only on the object of the disagreement, but how the subject should be thought. (I’m using subject and object very deliberately.)
  2. The new way of thinking (the subject) needed to be followed to be understood. It was not a process at arriving at a conclusion, but more picking up a style or acquiring a sense of genre.
  3. The following of the thought required a kind of momentum and holistic grasping of the thinking as a single event. (This is different from following an argument, which consists of a series of discrete, linked accomplishments.) This explains why, if a passage is thorny, I have to work out the difficulties part by part, then reread the passage rapidly and smoothly before I understand the material.

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There is a kind of temporal holism in understanding. We see it in all performing arts — music, dance, cinema. Each moment of a performance must be experienced in flowing reference to what preceded it or the meaning gets lost.

I believe this is how philosophy works as well. Perhaps philosophy is more of a performing art than a plastic art.

Maybe this is where the appeal “stay with me” or “follow this line of thought” comes in. It means “grok this temporal whole.”

We can no more understand an interrupted, interrogated line of thought than we can hear interrupted phrases of a song as music. This is a thought I’ve had before, but the connection with this problem is new.

Antibuddhism

Design, Philosophy

It has been said that a soul is a society. Let’s assume this is true. It is true.

And let’s assume that every soul, being a society, has its own internal culture, its own internal political factions, its own internal injustice, and its own persecuted, marginalized parties longing from freedom and recognition.

Every association a soul makes with the external world affects its culture and politics. It empowers, liberates, suppresses, ostracizes or enslaves some soul-faction.

(There is such continuity between the internal and external world that ignoring the distinction has some analytical value. Even denying the existence of essential self can have merit.)

Relationships between people (or, rather, between soul-factions) can overpower those relationships that hold an individual’s soul together. When this happens, the term “individual” is exposed as inadequate. Love is the most conspicuous example of this kind of turmoil.

Being “one in flesh”, or, conversely, feeling “torn”, or having “two minds” has more literal truth to it than one suspects. It takes two to know that truth.

When a person’s internal society changes, that person’s external relationships must be renegotiated, most of all the more intimate ones. Deep internal change transforms an intimate into a stranger.

Jealously is an instinctual defense against estrangement.

Spiritual folks disparage jealousy as an illegitimate attempt to possess another person. Their understanding of possession is impoverished, the consequence of a desire to be invulnerable, to be “not of this world.” We are of this world, especially when we refuse to be.

There are relationships between people and objects that affect a person’s internal culture and politics. This is one reason that design is so important.

Despite what spiritual folks insist, we are as much our possessions as we are “ourselves”.

The world we inhabit holds us together. Our efforts to physically and socially shape our worlds are as important to soul-care as so-called inner work.

Religion is taking our finite place within infinity. Infinity is, from the perspective of finitude, inexhaustible surprise. Infinity literally, etymologically, sur-prises every finite being.

Religion should, especially in these times, attempt profound enworldment. Religion should be the furthest thing from “not of this world.” Spirituality — especially “spiritual-but-not-religious” spirituality — is how we try to get our mind to feel some specific divine way, maybe blissful? or peaceful? or ecstatic? or overwhelmed with awe? And typically, its method is aestheticized solipsism.

Great summary of A. James Gregor’s Totalitarianism and Political Religion

Philosophy, Politics

Dennis B. Mulcare’s Amazon review of A. James Gregor‘s Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History is such a thorough and clear a summary of the book, I’ve decided to post it here:

Note that the subtitle of this book, “An Intellectual History”, indicates that the scholarly evolution and consolidation of ideas and strategies integral to totalitarianism are the major focus of this book. This perspective contrasts with a necessarily selective recounting of persons, events, and outcomes in the large that typify history books in general. To me, the author’s focus is a big plus: more direct and immediate engagement of the origins, motivations, and rationales regarding historical happenings versus third-party recapitulations, reconstructions, and/or interpretations of those happenings. In “Totalitarianism and Political Religion” then, far more coverage is accorded to the seminal thinkers and energizing concepts behind 20th century totalitarian ideologies than to the historical figures, activities, and outcomes involved in their actualizations.

As the central concept of this book, a political religion is a faith-based political movement that embodies an institutionalized belief system. In its essence and organization, it sacralizes a profane base of power, thereby undergirding a system of coercive governance. During the early twentieth century, moreover, each of the three full-fledged totalitarian governments enlisted a customized political religion to motivate and control its population. In my understanding, the following elements in concert characterize or explicate the concepts and modus operandi common to the three aforementioned regimes:

1. Totalitarianism is a class of ideologies that seeks to control all aspects of life, commerce, and governance within a country or politically organized unit. Its doctrine and rationale are captured in an ideology, which typically relies on a political religion for its realization and dynamism.

2. An ideology is an all-encompassing doctrine that purports to explain the essence and workings of the world, and to prescribe or to proscribe the behavior of the humans within a polity. In all, an ideology is a closed worldview that claims to be secular in nature and to have an infallible basis grounded in science.

3. The ideologies of Leninism, Fascism, and Nazism were intellectually fully developed prior to their respective articulations and implementations by Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler. Largely, this book describes the historical trajectory of the intellectual evolution of each of these three “-isms”.

4. Sacralization is the ascription to a profane concept or object of the attributes that are normally properties or practices of traditional transcendent religions. The intent is to co-opt the natural religious tendencies if not the spiritual fervor of humans for purposes of the regime.

5. Instances of political religions examined in this book are: History as religion – per Engels & Marx; Revolution as religion – per Lenin; State as religion – per Mussolini; and Race as religion – per Hitler. All four cases in their particular manifestations share the salient characteristics of a generic political religion.

6. The de facto if implicit centrality of political religions in the above ideologies belies their claims of secular nature. Similarly, their emphatic normative prescriptions/proscriptions wholly discredit their scientific pretenses. In all cases, the various ideologies are based on faith, and not on empirical evidence or logical arguments.

7. Ultimately, the realization of a totalitarian ideology is seen to depend on a combination of: societal predispositions and circumstances; fanatical commitment to seeking power; technological resources to promote/enforce the ideological doctrine; and a suitable political religion. The latter serves to resonate with a society’s extant predispositions, to activate/sustain ideological doctrine, and to exploit the spiritual proclivities of humans in general.

For me, this book provided several novel and powerful insights, as well as learned exemplifications of some notions I had already possessed. New insights included: the seeming universal recognition among political theorists of the innate and persistent spiritual core of humans; and the force and persistence of ideas over their application, and hence the dominance of thinkers over practical or worldly political leaders (not that thinkers and leaders are mutually exclusive categories). Reinforced or exemplified notions were: the fanatical compulsion of certain activists to force their presumptuous, fatuous visions of worldly salvation on hapless populations; and the recurring reliance upon emotional appeals to engender and maintain popular support for a regime or its agenda.

Although the subject of this book would seem to be rather specialized, I believe that its treatment by the author possesses genuine appeal for many serious readers. In focusing on intellectual history, moreover, this book addresses a topic meriting broader interest, and in so doing fathoming WHY certain things can have happened as they did. Of lesser relative interest, to me at least, are general historical accounts describing factually or speculatively WHAT ostensibly did happen. Such a tradeoff reduces to addressing the core essence of a generic matter versus engaging the broader particularities of instances thereof. The former option, coupled with the author’s thoughtful and revealing exposition of a very important topic, underlies my high regard for “Totalitarianism and Political Religion”.

What would a designed philosophy look like?

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Fructivism, Philosophy

I’ve been bothered by a simple question: if philosophy is, as I believe, a design discipline, what is 1) its material, 2) its specifications (“deliverables”, the plan of the designed thing), 3) its artifact (the designed thing itself), and 4) its actualization (the actual using of the designed thing), the qualities of which are the ultimate, though indirect, goal of design?

I am asking this way, not because of some compulsion for finding structural parallels, but because the problem of what a philosophy is and should do has been perplexing me. What is a philosophy? What is its nature? Is it the assertions? The logic? Is it a kind of thinking style?  When we apply the philosophy, or what is the nature of this “thing” that is applied?

It all becomes a little less perplexing (or gives me some degree of grip on the problem) when I compare it to other forms of design and make structured comparisons.

Even with the most concrete and tangible kinds of design, the ultimate intended effect is practical and experiential, and experiences are painfully indirect. The fact that designs in use disappear in the activity of using does not help matters at all.

Let’s start with some concrete examples, and see if they suggest new ways to think about philosophy. I will answer the question with two design disciplines I know well, UX and service design.

With UX, 1) the material is digital media (screens and other interfaces, and the underlying systems which enable and constrain what is possible); 2) the specifications are process flows and screen schematics (wireframes); 3) the artifact is the software or site; and 4) the actualization is a good user experience — effortless, pleasant and fruitful interaction with the software.

With service design, 1) the material is the entire extended organization (including not only the whole organization, including employees, partners, physical and digital infrastructure, practices/processes, policies, etc., but every point where value is co-created by delivery of the service, that is, with customers and users of the service); 2) the specifications are moment architectures and service blueprints; 3) the artifact is the service in its various forms across delivery channels; 4) the actualization is a good service experience for every actor involved in delivering, supporting or receiving the service.

So, giving philosophy this same treatment, 1) the material of philosophy is language in the most general sense (including not only words but symbols of every kind); 2) the specifications are lessons in the most general sense (books, essays, lectures, conversations, arguments, models, paradigms); 3) the artifact is concepts (understood as thought-producing mental behaviors, which is confusing because these behaviors are impossible to state directly and factually, but must be demonstrated); 4) the actualization is a thoroughly second-natural way of understanding (meaning that it becomes spontaneous and transparent) some domain of life (or the entirety of life) in a way experienced as better. By better, I mean more comprehensible, more livable and more valuable. By better, I mean we are able to avoid feeling perplexed, bewildered or indifferent to our lives.

As with all design, the work must be done with the actualization in mind, which is why the process is one of iterative experiment with direct involvement with those who will finally actualize the design. This is why human-centered design practice, or, in the case of service design, polycentric design practice are not specialized types of design but, simply, design competence. The implications to the practice of philosophy are significant. Does this help explain why philosophers crave conversation? Is the attempt to persuade an informal kind of philosophy design practice?

This is a first crack, so everything is up for discussion.

A word on extremism

Philosophy

An ideology that views certain traits or tendencies even in a weak, attenuated form, even in the form of a private belief,  as violent extremism in embryo — and therefore deserving preemptive attack as if it were already violent — is itself an actualized extremist ideology.

Such ideologies call many things “violent”: harboring detestable beliefs attitudes or feelings; tolerating detestable beliefs, attitudes or feelings; using words it doesn’t like; using words it does like but using them improperly; refraining from doing and saying what it believes ought to be done or said (aka “silence”); and, increasingly, failing to cooperate with attempts to expurgate unconscious beliefs and biases lurking undetected in one’s soul. A typical example of this use of the word “violence”:

“There’s this anxiety over saying the wrong thing,” says deandre miles-hercules, a PhD linguistics student who focuses on sociocultural linguistic research on race, gender, and sexuality. “And so instead of maybe doing a little research, understanding the history and the different semantic valences of a particular term to decide for yourself, or to understand the appropriateness of a use in a particular context, people generally go, ‘Tell me the word, and I will use the word.’ They’re not interested in learning things about the history of the term, or the context in which it’s appropriate.”

But miles-hercules argues that while people may not intend harm when they use identity labels inaccurately, their inaccuracy is still harmful. “People tune in to this, ‘What is the word? Do I call you African American? Do I call you Black? What is the word that people are preferring these days? I know I can’t call you Negro anymore! So just tell me the word so I can use it and we can go on from there,’” they say. “But that lacks in nuance. And that lack of nuance is a violence.”

Does it occur to miles-hercules that forcing a non-linguist to do research on other people’s latest linguistic research and understanding its theory and practice in order to acquire the skills to satisfy the requirements of one particular school of linguists (and whatever form of “accountability” or “consequences” is deemed appropriate by this group if their requirements are not met) — is itself violent? Are such questions ever asked?

Where do beliefs like these lead — beliefs which do not hesitate to take real social, physical, technological, economic and legislative action, to prevent others from doing the same in the future?

Recall the progression from 1) being expected to conceal one’s own thoughts, 2) to being required (usually by people with power)  to act according to ideological dictates, 3) to being required to make modifications to one’s own soul, even at the unconscious level — again by people with power.

The sphere of control an ideology of this kind claims has no logical limits.

It is time to call it what it is. It is a strain of totalitarianism.

Redemption by design

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Rorty, being intensely Rorty:

…the intellectuals of the West have, since the Renaissance, progressed through three stages: they have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now from literature. Monotheistic religion offers hope for redemption through entering into a new relation to a supremely powerful nonhuman person. Belief in the articles of a creed may be only incidental to such a relationship. For philosophy, however, beliefs are of the essence. Redemption by philosophy is through the acquisition of a set of beliefs that represent things in the one way they really are. Literature, finally, offers redemption through making the acquaintance of as great a variety of human beings as possible. Here again, as in religion, true belief may be of little importance.

And redemption by design is arranging the elements of life — people, things, ideas, etc. — in systems that allow them to cooperate for mutual benefit, however benefit is conceived by the cooperating agents.

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I would like to count among the number of cooperating agents, “infrapersons” — psychic components of personality whose dynamic relations produce myriad moods, feelings, experiential colorings. Different designs will engage different infrapersons. Writing with a Bic pen or a #2 Ticonderoga is a different experience because it engages different infrapersons than writing with a Pelikan Souveran M800 or a Rotring 600 pencil. Sitting in a cubicle under a cold fluorescent strobe suppresses elements of self that might come out when sitting under sparkling halogen in a studio space. We feel more “like ourselves” when more of our self — more of our own infrapersons — have an opportunity to emerge and participate in our living. An important task of designers is to acknowledge and serve neglected infrapersons. To the degree it accomplishes this, design generates excitement, newness and je ne sais quoi. Cynics might dismiss this as slaking appetites for pointless consumption, but this is an uncharitable view of the profound relationship people can have with things in the world. I view these proud “anti-materialism” sentiments as a leftist strain of “not of this world” puritanism.)

Philosophical images

Philosophy

Ancient Greece gave us the concept of philosopher-king.

The classical 18th century contributed the image of the philosophe, the philosopher-liberal.

The romantic 19th century created the ideal philosopher-poet.

The rationalist 20th century specified many species and sub-species of philosopher-specialist, each with its own technical vocabulary, incomprehensible outside its own specialized discourse.

I hope the 21st century will instaurate a great variety of philosopher-designers.

Design Pragmatism

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

DISCLAIMER: This post is a big mess (which is why it’s been hidden from November 2020 until today March 31, 2021), but it’s got a lot of good, useful stuff in it, so I’m making it public.

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In the winter of 2002, I developed a new life-changing habit. I began waking up early in the morning to drink tea and study philosophy before work. My family was living in Toronto at the time, and we loved exploring the diverse neighborhoods in the downtown area. On one of our excursions, we purchased some oolong tea, and the elaborate gear used to brew tea in the traditional gongfu way. We had a yixing teapot, special paired teacups (one for tasting the tea, and another for experiencing the aroma), a brewing platform for the teapot with a hidden water reservoir for the tea that is spilled and splashed when prepared in the gongfu way, tongs, scoops, canisters, carafes and cloths. My daughter Zoë, who was nine at the time, was enchanted by it all and started waking me up before dawn to make tea and talk about life. After she left for school, I read philosophy, starting with Nietzsche. The experience of reading philosophy first thing in the morning in a caffeinated state was inspiring, and it became the center of a new way of living.

When the habit was new, my work and my reading were compartmentalized. I was working as a user interface designer, and I didn’t like it. Most of the work was stressful and tedious. I did it for the paycheck. My thinking and reading time was an escape from work. If my work benefitted from anything I read, that was purely accidental. My reading choices were driven solely by what problems seemed interesting and important to me, and work was the furthest thing from either.

Gradually, however, my philosophical interests evolved in directions that happened to be useful. I moved from reading Nietzsche to studying phenomenology, hermeneutics and pragmatism. I found that these subjects helped me find better ways to think about and talk about how designers approach discovering, defining, exploring and resolving problems. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was rediscovering the sources of design thought, and haphazardly self-educating myself on the family of philosophies that contributed to the development of design methods. As my design practice became more theoretically lucid, I started enjoying design more, and taking it more seriously as a vocation.

Soon I was surprised to notice the influence flowing back from design to philosophy. I found myself applying concepts and language from the world of design to philosophical problems. I started asking the kinds of questions designers habitually ask about design proposals and applying them to philosophical ideas, and tried to clarify and resolve those questions using designerly approaches. Of course, I had always been sensitive to the physical form of the books I read, the quality of the typesetting and the style of the writing. What was new was asking these same questions about the philosophy itself — systems of ideas used in daily life to make sense of things and to produce thoughts.

It started with Liz Sanders’s useful/usable/desirable framework, a conceptual tool of such fundamental importance that some designers, including myself, use it to define the very purpose of design. The designer’s job is to ensure that whatever their team is making is useful, usable and desirable for its intended users. I noticed myself casually wondering: “How useful is this philosophy?” What is it meant to do for the one who learns to use it? Where is it helpful? And: “How usable is this philosophy?” With practice will it become intuitive, habitual and as invisible as Beatrice Ward’s crystal goblet? And: “How desirable is this philosophy?” Does it intensify my esteem for life? Or does the world feel bleak and pointless when experienced through this philosophy?

This led to a more conscious exploration of the similarities between design and philosophy, culminating in a question:

What if we approach philosophy as a design discipline?

In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence Bruno Latour raised a question: “To say of a thing that it is constructed is to introduce a value judgment, not only on the origin of the action… but on the quality of the construction … Constructed, yes, of course, but is it well constructed?”

Designers, of course, are concerned with quality of constructions, and specifically with constructions of the kind Latour calls “hybrid”, constructions constituted of beings of diverse kind, including humans and nonhumans. When designers set out to design something, one of the first things we do is study the contexts in which this designed thing will be experienced and used by people. A new design, if adopted, will be woven into this context, and will change it by becoming part of it. A well-constructed designed artifact (whether a physical or virtual object, an environment, a service, a process, a communication, or whatever) helps produce a well-constructed context, experienced as better by those who inhabit it.

By now, the idea that truth is constructed is not only well-known, it is a comic truism. My younger daughter Helen and her friends enjoy ironically dismissing random things by declaring them constructs. I tried out Latour’s concept of well-constructed constructs on her. “If truth is a construct, shouldn’t we pay attention to the craft quality of our truth constructions? Shouldn’t we use the best available design methods to ensure these constructions do what we need them to do, and do it well? This extends my earlier question. What if we approach philosophy as a design problem by using design methods to produce well-constructed philosophies that improve their social contexts?

It is hard to pin down what philosophy is, in order to even know what it is we are designing. It is important

Philosophy is the practice of thinking about thinking. It investigates how we think and how this affects what we think and how we act.

Two quotes encapsulate the purpose and method of philosophy, or at least the kind of philosophy I care about. The first is from Wilfrid Sellars: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” The second is from Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said something important about philosophy by observing what happens when philosophy stops functioning normally, and becomes problematic: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'”

 

  • Briefs
  • Models
  • Stories
  • Tradeoffs
  • Evaluation frameworks
  • Interviewing
  • Experiments
  • Altitudes
  • Hybrids
  • Interfaces
  • Comparisons
  • Apprehension
  • Invisibility (ready-to-hand / present-at-hand)
  • Alignment — winning cooperation
  • Adoption
  • Instrumentalism
  • Meliorism
  • Pluralism
  • Participation
  • Interaction
  • Cooperation (voluntary participation) avoiding coercion)
  • Participation
  • Eversion
  • Ethnomethodic Rules
  • Instauration
  • Misnorms
  • Extended existence
  • Wicked problems
  • Directional visions (north stars)
  • Triage
  • Adoption (as a substitute for progress)
  • Perceptual (categorial?) affordances
  • Multistability
  • Redescription
  • Fragilism – No truth can bear scrutiny. Looking closer is conceptual dynamite.

Moral meta-judgments

Ethics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I have (in agonistic dialogue with Nick Gall) found a way to distinguish a relative value from a universal moral principle in pragmatic terms. What, precisely, is the difference that makes a difference if we believe in universal moral principles?

My short answer is that if we believe a universal moral principle applies to a judgment, we assign moral value to agreeing with the judgment.

If we believe our judgment is a relative value judgment, we do not assign moral value to agreeing with it.

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I initially framed this as a thought experiment. Imagine Witness A who witnesses an act committed by Actor B, and later reflects on the act with Co-witness C.

Witness A judges Actor B’s act as abhorrent. Co-witness C judges it as okay.

If Witness A understands her judgment as one of relative value, she will still see actor B’s behavior as bad, but will view Co-witness C’s judgment as merely different from her own.

However, if Witness A understands her judgment as one of universal morality, she will judge actor B’s behavior as bad, and meta-judge Co-witness C’s judgment as also bad.

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The universality of a universal moral principle applies less to the object of judgment than to the judging subject. What is universal is the meta-judgment, the belief that here all competent judges should agree.

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Now, of course, what I am saying sets up an infinite regression. But now I’ll get all tricky and say that willingness to keep regressing is also a sign of holding universal moral principles, and refusal to even begin, makes one a value relativist.

We can also do the Rortian move and break apart our naive moral realist reaction from our account of why we are having the reaction. (“I, for one, will act on my feelings of indignation toward injustice, even though I know they are just socially-contingent feelings.”) This move seems aimed primarily at weakening our meta-judgments. (“Because my emotions are socially contingent, it is acceptable for you to not share them.”)

The move could be made to work not only on our judgments, but also our meta-judgments (and our meta-meta-judgments). (“I will act on my feelings of indignation toward injustice and also tolerance of injustice, even though they just my socially-contingent feelings.”) But now what does this line of thought do?

So far, I cannot see any pragmatic consequence for this move unless it nullifies our meta-judgments. All I can come up with we might adopt this strategy for the sake of conceptual coherence — keeping our understanding of how things hang together hanging together better.

For me, this move is an unacceptable tradeoff — of sincerity for theoretical coherence. I am unable to avoid having negative judgments of nonjudgmental attitudes toward certain clear cut cases of viciousness. However much I call them epiphenomenal, I believe these judgments and meta-judgments are valid, and act on their validity.

I can’t say way — not yet, anyway —but this prioritization of sincerity over coherence strikes me as being a matter of relative values, of philosophical taste. I do not expect everyone to prioritize sincerity over coherence, and I do not meta-judge those with different priorities.

Philosophy adoption

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Trefoil

Susan asked: how is the philosophy design you envision different from Kuhnian paradigm shifts? The answer she extracted from me gets to the heart of my project, and I will need to emphasize this point in Second Natural: The physical sciences, and the attitude toward truth inspired by the physical sciences places all emphasis on epistemic and practical knowing (“what” and “how”) and trades off moral (valuative) knowing (“why”), which becomes a sort of ethic of scientificality. “The truth hurts” and being scientific means embracing the pain of sacrificing all other values.

But if we accept that we live in a truly pluralistic reality, and embrace the consequence that no single philosophy is capable of accounting for reality without strategically excluding, distorting or underemphasizing some realities in favor of others, we are freed question this tradeoff. A new scientific paradigm may give physicists a new way to conceptualize some stubbornly puzzling corner of their field, but these advantages might not be worth what is given up for ordinary people whose conceptual needs differ from those of physicists.

Once we see concepts as tools for selective perception, categorization and reasoning which permit some kinds of response and suppress others, we are freed (to a degree) to think of philosophies, components of philosophies and philosophical implications as matters of adoption. We can say physics theories what the best atheists say of God: “I have no need of that hypothesis.” If our concerns do later come in contact with theological or scientific problems, we might have to rework our personal philosophies in order to faithfully contend with their claims. This is especially true if we wish to win the respect of those communities and persuade them to accept our own beliefs. But this is not all that different from the adoption of any other technology that integrates with its design context.